SPACE March 2026 (No. 700)
The Understory
The western part of the Hoam Museum of Art has been carefully cultivated over the years. A dense forest of bald cypress trees stands in rows, and, behind them, a sculpture park sits atop a retaining wall built of stacked sandstone. This was once the home of the works of Antoine-Emile Bourdelle, a French sculptor, and we were invited to participate in a design competition to create a café within this sculpture garden. The site initially proposed was the upper area of the park, raised like a podium overlooking the reservoir. However, we found ourselves more deeply drawn to a different imaginative space, approaching the café as if wandering through the cypress forest, gradually slipping into the site beyond the retaining wall. This idea became the foundation for our winning scheme.
After several stages of revision after the competition, the Hoam Cafe became a single hall embedded beneath the ground behind the sandstone wall. The existing retaining wall was integrated into the new structure, becoming part of its exterior. The sandstone, bearing the traces of time, was brought back to be reused as the fi...
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Kim Jinhyu
Kim Jinhyu graduated from the Yale School of Architecture and Seoul National University. Prior to founding KimNam Architects, He worked at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, SO-IL in New York, and SANAA in Tokyo. He is a registered architect in Korea. He has previously taught the design studio at Seoul National University and Hanyang University.
Nam Hojin
Nam Hojin graduated from the Yale School of Architecture and of Ewha Woman University. Prior to founding KimNam Architects, she worked at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects in New Haven, SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) in New York City, and Namsan A&C in Seoul. She is a registered architect of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). She is currently serving as an Adjunct Professor at Ewha Womans University.
KimNam Architects
KimNam Architects is an architectural design firm that originated in a remote village in Switzerland in 2014. Since 2015, it has been active in Seoul, continuing its work. In 2024, they was awarded the Grand Prize by the Korea Association for Archtiectural History. KimNam Architects emphasises the existence of diverse values and perspectives in architecture, questioning and redrawing with the view that ‘what was right yesterday may be wrong today.’
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